


fallen leaves

by Apalapucian



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hogwarts, Lowercase, Marauders, Marauders Friendship, Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 07:40:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14972330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apalapucian/pseuds/Apalapucian
Summary: they don't tell you about the quiet days.





	fallen leaves

**Author's Note:**

> **an:** for [@jilyislife](https://tmblr.co/mZp6nhVOsq9KEyddIeDJK6A), [@karatekling](https://tmblr.co/mYW7fIokmkTTOyUl68mQ2ow), [@gypsphila](https://tmblr.co/moayWpZcCQ5GOrXWcFHhCAw), [@ihopeyoucanseemesmiling](https://tmblr.co/mbdbVAuQScugCI5QR9nUrvQ), and [@lindsue](https://tmblr.co/malWyStOiTMZ3iE3wn7uJCg). thank you for making me smile (and making me keep writing). you mean more than i can say.

there are those moments that moved mountains. blazed trails, so they say, and you always hear about them. the quidditch victories, the fist fights, sirius running away from home for good, james and lily’s first date. ah, the first date. lots of that one actually: first kiss, first fight, first everything. the lasts, too. people can’t seem to help it. you sit, and you listen, and you nod and hum your way through it. sure, sometimes it feels like molten gold is trickling on your skin. but you think - still. it’s better than nothing.

there’s remus’s first night with prongs, padfoot, and wormtail. the almost-expulsions, the impossible friendships, the most elaborate pranks. there are photographs as well - too many at the time, not barely enough much later - taped on notebooks and on walls, both magic and muggle. some captions are hard to read - were they laughing when they wrote? drunk? shaking? you ask whose camera was used, where is it now, perhaps there are more? no one remembers.

you start wondering about the quiet days. there’s not much about those. maybe they didn’t - don’t? - matter as much. maybe no one just knows about them. but they were there. they must have been. 

they don’t tell you about remus and peter in remus’s bed, for example, curtains drawn on a friday night, listening to james and sirius fight just a few steps away. something about lily. well, it  _was._ then it morphed, somehow, into a thing about regulus, then _remus_ , then peter, then - then _something else_ now, something _stupid._ remus has lost track; he’s trying his best to drown them out. they’re probably _this close_ to punching each other, but they stay there, remus and peter. they stay there until it’s quiet again and peter falls asleep and remus is free to cry, because some nights are still like this - of _course_ some nights are still like this - and he hates everything.

they don’t tell you about peter sneaking out of the dorm at 3 AM to study a few more hours alone downstairs, because it’s just never enough, whatever he does and however much, and he doesn’t understand how the others have it so fucking easy. 

they don’t tell you about all the letters lily got from petunia in her first year. how she hid them - then unhid them and hid them and unhid them again. how she reads them in the dead of the night for fear of its contents being exposed, because her new friends _marvel_ at how much she is being missed from home, getting all these letters so often. she’s eleven for god’s sake. that’s too young for anyone to miss people that bad, that much, that way. 

they don’t tell you about sirius watching regulus behind his curtain of hair during breakfast. how he excuses himself sometimes to purposely run into him in another part of the castle. he doesn’t know why he does that anyway. he never does, each time. especially not when it always ends up with them walking away and despising each other a little more. some days he’ll hear him laugh nearby - and his heart will drop, because reg’s  _laughing,_ and he’d been around that laugh long enough for it to have latched on his soul, but also it’s probably over something no one should be laughing about. it’s always hard. everything about reg is always hard. they don’t tell you about the exact moment sirius vows not to care anymore - a happenstance duel on top of the astronomy tower, just the two of them, unspoken about forever - because every other alternative has somehow exhausted itself down to just destruction.

they don’t tell you about the only hogwarts christmas breakfast they ever missed. about the sun rising on those four inseparable gryffindor boys that morning, on their last christmas in school, huddled in a corner of their common room. they don’t tell you that the three found james in that corner late last night. that christmas day is exactly forty-three days after james’s mum died, fifty-four after his dad. that he was wrapped in his invisibility cloak and his shoulders were shuddering so bad in sobs that he couldn’t help. that he couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, couldn’t drive them away or ask them to stay. that no one else honestly knew what to say. that they sat with him there anyway, all night, all three of them, and held him. they don’t tell you about that.

they don’t tell you about peter’s hands shaking when he sees that he has for once scored an acceptable in a potions homework. they don’t tell you about remus waking up first the morning after a full moon, finding his friends snoring all around him, and trying to muffle his stupid happy-crying about it with his bandaged knuckles. they don’t tell you about how the first time james holds lily’s hand is actually an accident; that they’re walking side by side and he’s swinging his arms about because he’s nervous and he catches her hand mid-swing and he just - he just goes for it, what the hell. they don’t tell you that one of the paper snowflakes that decorated the gryffindor common room on christmas of ‘77 was made from a torn page of lily’s notebook, that, if you squint, you can see  _james_ written on one side, because before the patterns were cut the whole thing had been _james, i think i might actually die seeing you this sad,_ scribbled the week before in charms class while staring at the back of his head from two rows away. they don’t tell you about sirius majorly choking up on his thank-you when james’s parents show him to his own room in the manor. that, when the door shut, he bounced up and down on his toes for a good five seconds before running out to the hall to catch up to them and give them a hug.

those moved mountains, too. so they say. or maybe hills. or maybe just cracked some plains a little. dented some boxes, left scuff marks on the floor.

so they say, so they say.


End file.
